September 29, 2009

Today we’re releasing Cornerstone 1.5 after 8 months of development and 2 months of beta testing. It’s a huge release containing numerous new features and tons of smaller improvements and refinements.

We’ve listened very carefully to input from our users since 1.1 was released and have worked hard to make Cornerstone both more powerful and easier to use. We’ve also added support for Subversion 1.6 and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

The improvements made to 1.5 are listed in detail in the release notes, but the major additions are:

Improved User Interface

Cornerstone’s user interface was redesigned to make navigation more consistent and intuitive. The new screen-based interface also makes far better use of available screen space.

New Log View

The new log view compliments the existing timeline view by displaying a project’s log in a form similar to the output of svn‘s log command.

New Commit View

We have made big improvements to the commit view: it’s now non-modal, files can be included and excluded, and most important of all, files can be compared right in the commit view.

New Transcript View

The new transcript view provides progress information on operations such as updates and commits.

New Externals Editor

1.5 now includes support for editing svn:externals properties in the form of a new dedicated externals editor.

New Preference Pane for Subversion Configuration

The most commonly-used Subversion configuration options can now be configured within Cornerstone. Supported options include global ignores, auto properties and HTTP proxy settings.

We believe that these improvements combine to make this a substantial release, so much so that we decided it deserved the jump to version 1.5.

1.5 is a free upgrade for all 1.0 and 1.1 license holders and is available for immediate download.

While some users are successfully running Cornerstone on Snow Leopard, enough users are experiencing issues that our recommendation is to hold off upgrading to Snow Leopard if you need to run Cornerstone.

But the good news is that you don’t have long to wait:

We have added support for both Snow Leopard and Subversion 1.6 to the next 1.x update of Cornerstone and plan to release the new version this September.

November 7, 2008

Since its introduction, the single-user Cornerstone license has been priced at a discounted $59 introductory price (the 5- and 10-user packs were not discounted).

Prior to the introduction of v1.0, our intention had been to target a non-discounted price of $69 for the single-user license but to permanently reduce this to $59 with the introduction of v1.1 if the US Dollar/Swiss Franc exchange rate allowed.

Unfortunately, the recent turmoil in the financial markets and downturn in the US economy have resulted in the US Dollar maintaining its weak position against both the Swiss Franc and Euro. With the majority of our customers located in the United States we find ourselves unable to maintain the current $59 introductory price point.

The price of the single-user license has therefore been increased to $69 with the introduction of v1.1.

The pricing of the 5- and 10-user license pack remains the same at $259 and $449 respectively.

We have received literally thousands of mails from users in the four months since the release of Cornerstone v1.0 requesting new features and suggesting improvements.

We have listened very carefully to this input and worked hard to improve Cornerstone in a number of ways:

Performance

We received a lot of feedback that Cornerstone’s working copy and repository browsers weren’t as snappy as they should have been in v1.0, so we made this our number one priority for this release.

Compatibility

Subversion v1.5 was released too late for Cornerstone v1.0 so adding support to v1.1 became a top priority as user feedback made it clear that Subversion users are quickly transitioning to 1.5.

New Features

Several commonly-requested features were added such as full documentation in Apple Help Book format, the ability to edit repository attributes and the display of hyperlinks for issue tracking numbers in the history browser.

Usability Improvements

We have responded to user feedback by integrating over 25 improvements into v1.1 to improve usability and reduce the time it takes to perform routine tasks.

Bug Fixes

In total, over 80 issues have been implemented/fixed, including numerous bug fixes and enhancement requests resulting directly from user feedback.

We feel that these improvements combine to make v1.1 a significant release. See the application’s release notes for a detailed summary of the changes made for v1.1.

v1.1 is a free upgrade for all v1.0 license holders and is available for immediate download.

June 25, 2008

In February 2007 we set ourselves the task of developing the Subversion client that the Mac deserves. And we thought that the best way to do this would be to build the best Subversion application not just on Mac OS X, but on any platform.

We wanted to make an application which would make version control usable and, most-of-all, approachable to Mac users. We decided to use Subversion as a basis for a number of reasons. First, it’s a relatively simple, yet powerfully flexible system. Second, it’s wildly popular. Third, it is under constant development and therefore holds much potential for the future. That fact that Subversion’s APIs are of a high-quality and generously published under the BSD license also helped!

But most importantly, we felt we could bring something unique to the table by combining the power of Subversion with the elegance of Mac OS X.

Cornerstone v1.0 is the result.

So after almost 18 months of designing, coding and testing; after almost 1.5 years of living and breathing Xcode, Interface Builder, Instruments, Photoshop, TextMate and Trac, here it is and it’s available for download and purchase immediately.

We hope you like it and use it.

We hope it becomes a valuable part of your coding tool-chain.

Finally, Cornerstone incorporates open-source and public-domain code from numerous individuals and organizations, not least of course Subversion itself. The full list of licensed components is included with the application in the form of an acknowledgements document (available in the application’s Help menu). We hope that those that have unknowingly (unwittingly?) contributed to Cornerstone feel their contributions are attributed to them in suitable fashion.